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Horse dentist and bad hooks in Wiltshire

Wiltshire horse dentist

In Wiltshire as in the rest of the planet horses get bad teeth. Hooks are the topic of todays cases.

What is a hook? A hook is a colloquial term for an overgrown tooth. Normally given to the 106, 206, 311 and 411. for a picture of the numbering system click here.

The reason the teeth hook is usually bad occlusion (occlusion is the term we use for teeth meeting) In Wiltshire as in the rest of the uk we have awesome rainfall and lovely soft grass. We also have horses with bad occlusion. So when i talk about a hook I mean a tooth that has grown too long as a result of the teeth not meeting and riding.

Maybe I should go back a step.

Horses have hyposodont teeth. Not a typical Wiltshire term. It means “long tooth”. Basically horses teeth are pretty long. However because of how much time they spend chewing (around 18 hours per day) they wear the teeth down. The jaw thus has a method of pushing out the fully grown tooth from the jaw bone to make it “longer” as the wear occurs. This becomes a problem however when the teeth don’t match up. At this point the tooth that has no tooth to wear against gets bigger. SO in the case of a badly aligned jaw the 106, 206, 311 and 411 will tend to overgrow.

Above you have a classic hook. Quite a big guy. The green stripe is pretty much where the tooth should be. If you look at the far right end of the green line you will see the rest of the molars. That is the height the large tooth should be sitting at. Have a look at the lump of tooth of on the right (as your looking at it) of the mouth. MONSTER!!

Here again you can see a large hook. The green stripe once again showing the normal height of that tooth (206) The red circle is a massive wad of grass impacted behind the 206 and the purple circle is damage caused to the cheek by the hook.

To fox this I would take a hand rasp and manually grind the tooth down. It would be nice to think that I could get this tooth down to the correct height on the first sitting, but to be honest I am probably going to get this done in 2 to 3 visits. I tend towards the conservative side when it comes to teeth. After all much like hair. You can take it off, but you can’t put it back. I would hate to hit the pulp chamber and open the tooth up to infection!!!